Amazon Ads Agent: what Full-Funnel and DVA+ mean for brands
At its unBoxed conference on September 29, 2026, Amazon Ads announced it is folding 14 years of separate buying tools into a single AI-run platform called Amazon Ads Agent. Two pieces of that platform matter directly to brands running Amazon advertising: Full-Funnel Campaigns, already live in the US, and DVA+, which begins rolling out in late October 2026. If you manage your own Amazon ad account, both are about to change what your campaign setup screen looks like.
What is actually changing
For years, Amazon split advertising into separate systems: Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands lived in the self-serve ads console, while display, video, and streaming TV buys ran through the Amazon DSP under a different login, different reporting, and a different minimum spend. Full-Funnel Campaigns and DVA+ collapse that split.
- Full-Funnel Campaigns let an advertiser set one budget, one set of products, and one piece of creative, and Amazon's AI plans and executes across sponsored ads, display, video, and streaming TV from there.
- DVA+ consolidates Sponsored Display, Sponsored TV, and programmatic buying (display, video, audio) into one simplified interface, powered by Amazon's Brand+ and Performance+ optimization. An advertiser picks an objective — sales, traffic, or awareness — adds products and creative, sets a budget, and the system builds the campaign. Advanced settings still exist underneath for teams that want to keep control of targeting, deals, supply sources, and bidding.
What this means for brands
Three things are worth planning around before DVA+ reaches your account:
1. Programmatic gets accessible at lower spend levels
DSP buying has historically carried a real budget floor and a learning curve that kept it out of reach for mid-size brands. DVA+'s simplified mode is explicitly built to bring display, video, and streaming TV budgets down to a level smaller advertisers can actually use. If you have been Sponsored Products-only because DSP felt like overkill, this is the moment to revisit that.
2. You lose some manual channel control by default
In Full-Funnel Campaigns' simplified mode, an advertiser cannot hand-pick which individual channel or audience segment gets which dollar — Amazon's AI makes that call toward whatever outcome you set (new-to-brand customers, long-term sales, and similar metrics). Brands that rely on channel-level attribution to justify ad spend to finance should test on a smaller budget before moving core campaigns over, and should set clear, trackable goals before the system is making channel splits for you.
3. Transparency on fees and supply sources is still an open question
Trade press coverage of the announcement flagged that as sponsored, display, and programmatic buying consolidate into one engine, advertisers should keep asking for clarity on supply sources, auction mechanics, and fee structure — items that were easier to audit when each buying type was a separate system with separate reporting.
What we are telling clients now
Do not flip every campaign to the new simplified mode on day one. Run DVA+ in parallel against your existing Sponsored Display and DSP setup for at least one full reporting cycle, keep your own channel-level tracking outside Amazon's dashboard while you validate the AI's allocation, and only shift core budget once the output matches or beats what manual management was already delivering. The upside is real — this is the first time true programmatic reach is priced within reach of brands below enterprise DSP minimums — but "available to everyone" and "right for your account on day one" are not the same claim.
If you want a second set of eyes on whether Full-Funnel or DVA+ makes sense for your current ad mix, that is exactly the kind of account review we run before recommending a change.
